TL;DR

Nordvision agreed to fund a programmer’s exchange between DR in Denmark, Rúv in Iceland and Yle in Finland. The exchange started off with me going to Iceland for two weeks. We collaborated on a meta-data project for Drupal called Yild by preparing for migration of Rúv’s terms to a Yild-compatible format and by writing a new Spotify provider module for it. We feel a lot of good came out of the project and are eager to continue it when someone from Iceland comes to Yle for a similar exchange in Q1/2017.

The project

Three nordic broadcasting companies: Svenska Yle, DR and RÚV have received funding from Nordvision to undertake a two week developers’ exchange between the companies. This text documents my experiences and findings from working with RÚV for two weeks.

Where it all started

The project first started in Amsterdam in 2014, when we met Helgi Páll Þórisson from RÚV at Drupalcon, a big convention for enthusiasts and professionals of the content management system Drupal. Both Icelandic RÚV and Finnish Yle were already using Drupal and we have the unique common ground of both being a publicly funded public service company with the same challenges and demands on the web platform.

We discussed the merits of Drupal and the unique problems we were facing. Quite soon the idea of collaborating was born. Coincidentally, there is already an organisation for such collaboration: Nordvision, which gathers representatives from all Nordic public service companies around the same table in a partnership.

Later, we would run into Helgi several times at various Drupal events and our visits to other Nordic public service companies. The idea of working together started to grow and pretty soon a developer exchange was proposed: One developer from Yle would work in Iceland at RÚV for a couple of weeks and later on, someone from RÚV would come work with Yle in Finland. Danish DR also expressed interest in being part of this program and time tables and other circumstances permitting, a similar exchange involving DR is planned for the future.

The exchange

After the summer of 2016 things started coming together: Nordvision approved the request for funding and pretty soon a time table was drafted: I would go to RÚV for two weeks in November 2016. At Yle and RÚV we started planning the details of the exchange.

We decided the developer exchange would focus on metadata, since Yle already uses a tagging system for Drupal that connects tags to an official source, such as Wikidata. This module or plugin for Drupal is an open source project called “Yild” (for Yle integrator for linked data). We agreed that our main focus would be to determine whether the same system could be used at RÚV and if so, to start implementing it.

The team

RÚV has a team of highly skilled web developers wrestling with a multitude of technologies, such as Swift, Python, PHP, to name a few. The team is cooped up in a far away corner of the building, fairly well isolated from the rest of the workforce. This is typical and unsurprisingly the same arrangement we use at Yle: Developers need to be isolated from outside disturbances and any interaction should ideally be channeled through one intermediary, a team leader or a scrum master.

What’s impressive is that two of the developers, Hannes and Jón, had only been at RÚV for a month when the exchange started and they were already highly productive. Hannes showed me the Apple TV app he was working on and told me the first version was already in production! Most of all, what stayed with me, was how fast RÚV had managed to make their new employees productive. Something many other companies could take note of.

Volunteer work

One thing that sets our organisations apart is that many developers at RÚV seem to be involved in some kind of extracurricular and in many cases volunteer activities:

Jón runs an non-profit initiative at the web address Koder.is to teach young kids programming. This is done with a Raspberry Pi computer that is able to run the popular game Minecraft in such a way that it can be programmatically manipulated using Python. This means the kids can learn to build houses by programming logic instead of the traditional approach of walking (in the game) to a spot and placing a building block there. I was impressed by how visual this process of learning the basic tools of programming is.

Gunnar is deeply involved in an initiative first introduced by BBC to give 9000 Icelandic children their own one-circuit-board computer, the so called Micro:bit. This collaboration between Microsoft and BBC gives the children an app that runs on their mobile. Using Bluetooth, they can first design the program in the app and then transfer it to the Micro:bit for running. I started Googling the Micro:bit and apparently there have been some Workshops at Kiasma, our modern museum, in Finland to introduce it to the public. In Iceland, this project has already evolved into an Icelandic web page developer by RÚV that contains dozens of exercises for those who want to learn how to program. I’m hoping to see similar initiatives in Finland as well. Maybe Yle could look into something similar or even collaborate with RÚV?

Micro:bit. The price is as tiny as the device itself: 25€.

Team management at RÚV

The first thing that catches your eye at the web developers’ office at RÚV is the gigantic kanban board in the middle of the room. Almost all the sticky notes are in the “ready for testing” or “done” column.

Yes, most of the issues are in the ”done” column.

Like most software companies these days, the chosen methodology is a sort of customised agile model with daily meetings and a desire to achieve synergy through shared problems and tasks. Whenever I told the team about a problem I was facing during a daily meeting, someone was always eager to offer a solution: “Icelandic always has problems with character encoding because of our many special characters”, Gísli Þórmar Snæbjörnsson offered helpfully.

Whenever one team-member recognised another member was working on something they had previous knowledge about, they were quick to offer assistance. I believe one big reason, perhaps the biggest, for implementing agile in a team is to move from working as individuals to working as a team and the Icelandic developers’ team was clearly a team. I often saw three or four people flock around the same screen, speaking enthusiastically about some new idea of problem they were having. In contrast, at Yle I usually see people keep to their own screen and I think this is something we could learn from the Icelandic team: to be more brave in seeking out other people’s ideas and thoughts.

Kick-off

We started the project with a kick-off meeting the very first day. Everyone on the web-team attended and it was decided I would primarily work with Jón, Hilmar and Helgi. These were all people with prior Drupal experience or, in Jón’s case, new employees who needed to familiarize themselves with the platform.

As part of the Kick-off meeting I demonstrated the Yild module to the whole team. Yle has been using the module for tagging content for several years and it is this experience and expertise that puts us in a position to help RÚV take their tagging to the next level.

Real structured data opens up exciting possibilities: For one, Google will start to know what the content is about, which will help the search engine ranking. Using a common vocabulary, there is also the possibility of linking content from different sites. If Svenska Yle writes about the Eurovision Song Contest, we could link to RÚV’s content about the same subject.

Code review

The next day the Drupal developers gathered for a more technical meeting: The code review and presentation of the Yild module. I explained the structure of the project and walked the team through the programming patterns in use.

Yild is a multi-part module where a core module provides the basic functionality. The core then calls upon so called provider modules to fetch tag suggestions and details from various external sources. Each external service has its own provider: Wikidata, Geonames, Wikipedia, Musicbrainz, etc.

Writing your own provider module is a relatively trivial task if they have a well-documented api to fetch data from. As a result from the code review, Hilmas became enthusiastic about writing a provider module for Spotify since that was something he needed for another project. By making Hilmar a co-maintainer for the Yild project, it would also be possible for him to contribute to the Yild project itself with a new component that added functionality: the ability to tag articles and other content with any artist, song or album that is on Spotify, complete with l descriptions and album covers.

Jón would in turn work on a provider for tagging with Icelandic politicians (an idea that was later scrapped and replaced by a provider for looking up Icelandic companies).

Helgi and I would work on researching how to best migrate from the current tag system on RÚV’s Drupal site. It was suggested that a migration tool for trying to match existing tags against a preferred provider would be useful for the whole Drupal community, so that would be my main focus for the next weeks, along with trying to match RÚVs tags against Wikidata to find out how many I could actually match.

The Spotify Provider

Hilmar was quick to finish his first draft of the Spotify provider module. After committing it to the version control repository at drupal.org, I read the code, tested the module and offered my comments and insights.

In just a few days, Hilmar went from not having seen the project before to contributing a provider module that was added to drupal.org for the benefit of the whole world. This felt like a big win for the project. Two Nordic public service companies had actually worked together on the same code and then released it as open source.

Looking up the Icelandic artist Mugison using the Spotify provider finds all albums and songs.

In the meantime, Jón discovered a bug that broke an important part of the functionality of Yild on cleanly installed systems. He quickly fixed the bug, made a patch, which was added to drupal.org and credited to him. We now had two Icelandic web developers from RÚV with official contributions to a Drupal project started by Finnish Yle.

Greynir

One thing to keep in mind is that the quality of your structured data can only be as good as the data you get from the provider. There was always a concern that Wikidata wouldn’t be good enough in Icelandic to actually be used with RÚV’s content.

During one of our first meetings, Jón mentioned there was a very exciting open source initiative for cataloging and structuring content on Icelandic news sites called Greynir. Greynir is an NLP (Natural Language Processing) parser for the Icelandic language. It indexes several sites and breaks the content into a tree structure, distilling the content into specific terms, such as names of people, places, job titles etc.

Greynir is developed by Vilhjálmur Þorsteinsson, a veteran programmer and enthusiast of deep learning and artificial intelligence. Jón set up a meeting to sit down with mr Þorsteinsson to discuss the possibility of turning Greynir into an API for use with Yild.

One way we use Yild at Yle is to fetch term suggestions based on the content. This requires some kind of analysis service that reads the text and offers suggestions on terms that are relevant for the content. There is currently no such service for Icelandic that we know of, but Greynir is very close and with a small amount of work might become such a service. This would help immensely with the tagging of Content at RÚV.

During the meeting mr. Þorsteinsson said it would be quite easy to give Greynir an Api structure and it’s an angle we are excited to move forward with.

Migration tools

The biggest obstacle for implementing Yild on RÚV’s site was always migrating from the current, unverified tags to something actually connected to Wikidata.

I set out to write a migration tool that would go through all 2000 tags used on RÚV’s website and try to match them with their Wikidata counterparts. After some challenges with character encoding – of which I had been duly warned – and a lot of translation help from my fellow team members and Google translate the tool was finally ready. Out of more than 2000 terms approximately half could be matched against Wikidata. The rest of the terms were saved in a report delivered to Helgi for further inspection.

Matching tags in Icelandic against terms found on Wikidata.

The way to move forward is now to analyse the migration data and see if it’s good enough to work with. The plan is to run the migration script on RÚV’s test servers and then on the production servers, after which moving to use Yild is simply a matter of enabling the module and teaching the editors to use it.

One particularly amusing problem was when I tried to match the Icelandic word for heavy rock, Þungarokk and kept getting a totally unrelated word from Wikidata that means “roofing sheet” (the sheets of corrugated steel used as roofing on some houses). The word was bárujárn. After a while I asked a team member if he had any idea why this might happen and he laughingly told me it was actually a term used by metalheads as a synonym for heavy rock since back in the beginning of the musical genre they thought the music sounded like hitting sheets of corrugated steel with a hammer. Sometimes the code works perfectly and it’s just the interpretation of the data that is wrong.

The way forward

Having completed the first part of the collaboration project, I feel it’s important not to lose momentum. It’s easy to pat ourselves on the back and congratulate each other on a job well done, but the reality is we’re not done yet.

In the near future, possibly in January, a developer from RÚV is scheduled to join our developers at Yle for two weeks. During that time we will work more on the metadata issues and hopefully come a step closer to implementing Yild on RÚV’s website. We will also likely work together on other issues to benefit from the knowledge of the Icelandic web developers.

In February RÚV is hosting Drupalcamp Northern Lights 2017 in Reykjavik. This will be another opportunity to meet and discuss the project. Hopefully by then, we will be on track to enable the Yild module at RÚV and start tagging in a common way.

There is another Nordvision project focused on API collaboration between the companies. During my stay I demonstrated Yle’s many APIs and walked some RÚV developers through the documentation. As it turns out, RÚV is eager and excited to bring their content to a similar API structure and I feel there is a great opportunity for collaboration around this issue as well. Both in imparting our knowledge of API design, but also ensuring our APIs are built with a similar structure so that we can share information and data more easily in the future.

Above all else though, I feel it’s important to keep the wheels in motion. There is a lot of potential and we’ve come a long way already. By producing something tangible, we stand a chance of bringing even more Nordic public service companies and specifically the developers together in collaboration.

About two and a half years ago I made a visualisation of the work on SYND so far. Much has happened since then, and with the three-year-anniversary of the first commits to the SYND repos rapidly approaching, I felt it was time to revisit gource and do another loop through the commit history. Presenting the three-year-mark of YDD development:

Much have changed since the previous visualisation, the biggest of the changes of course the creation of the two sub-branches of the project, SYND and FYND. It’s easy to see how much the project has expanded in scope and complexity since we started, something that would have happened even without the forking of the project.

Today yle.fi/aihe added the same-as link function to the Finnish terms. This makes it possible for users of yle.fi/aihe and Svenska.yle.fi (the Swedish pages got the function a while ago) to move between the metadata term page on the respective sites.

To face the challenges media and journalism faces in our new global and digital age, we need to solve the problems of packaging, distribution and relevance. For a large public broadcasting company this means there is a new need for streamlined workflows, efficient content handling and decentralised ways to aggregate content. We at the Finnish Broadcasting Company (Yle) believe metadata is the key to accomplish this.

We have on our site annotated all articles with terms from the Finnish thesaurus and ontology service Finto (previously named Onki). Last fall we also started using Freebase for people, organizations, places, events and media. Currently we have used over 10 000 general terms from the KOKO-ontology and over 5000 terms from Freebase. This whole period has been a time of investment, and now it’s time to cash in on it.

Getting the metadata sorted out

There is a project within Yle called Metatiedot kuntoon (link in Finnish) – Getting the metadata sorted out. The objective of the project is to unify the metadata used within Yle, bridge the silos created by the many systems, parts of the organization and languages used in our company. And also to open up our content as data.

For us at the Swedish Speaking department at Yle, we are sort of a miniature of the whole organisation, this has meant an opportunity as a smaller and more agile unit to experiment and try new paths. We have been the first to use the above-mentioned semantic annotation compliant with the principles of the semantic web. And we now continued with the practical job of linking the data.

We have at the time of writing (June 17th 2014) linked together Yle-content created in different parts of Yle’s organisation, using different publishing platforms and different languages. We have also indirectly been able to form connections between the written articles and the yet untagged video and audio content on our on demand streaming service, Arenan. Thus being able to enrich our knowledge of our own video and audio content through graph relations.

An API-driven approach

The ”traditional” way of building the semantic web and doing linked data has been through RDF and SPARQL. Our work has taken a bit of a different path, mostly due to limited resources and the application of lean development. For example the decision to start using Freebase, over say dbpedia, was mostly dictated by the fact that they had a better API for our purposes. We have also been uninterested (read: have not had the resources) to build our own schemas and ontologies and charting the world according to Yle. So we have chosen existing ontologies and metadata repositories to use for the annotation of our content.

And with that background RDF and SPARQL has seemed to be a too great learning curve and initial investment to make. But we haven’t wanted to part from the track set up by the semantic web effort. So we have taken great care to ensure the quality of the semantics, and safeguarded the machine readability through RDFa, Schema.org, Dublin Core and JSON-LD.

At the same time there is an ongoing large effort within Yle to put all our content up on API’s (link in Finnish). We have API’s for programmes, articles, images, user statistics and so forth. And now we also have an API for metadata.

We send our articles from Drupal to the articles-API. From there their metadata is also sent to a Neo4J graph database. And from there we can make relational queries over the meta-API. We have at the moment four different queries for our front end utilising the meta-API:

Linking content tagged with the same tag in different languages (all used metadata repositories are multilingual supporting at least Finnish, Swedish and English).

Giving recommendations for content with similar tagging.

Giving recommendations for content with similar tagging, but in a different language.

Giving indirect graph based recommendations of audio and video content from our on demand-service, Arenan, based on article-tag-relations.

These are now working on our development platforms and are at a proof-of-concept level. They will be gradually put in production as soon as we get some queries optimised for speed and our AD and front development team (of one 🙂) gets the rough edges sorted out.

Recommendations is the key to relevance

Overlapping the silos of organisation, systems, language and media type, using metadata and API’s

In the image above you see an article about flooding in Serbia. In the right hand column there are two clips that have been embedded in other articles with similar metadata, showing related flooding clips. In the subject listing below the videos is a list of more reading on the same subject(s). And furthest down to the right an article that also relates to flooding from our Finnish-speaking colleagues.

Above the drawing I left our developer along with a note – ”Can you build this?” – for the article-programme-connection.

Future proofing media publishing on the web

As more and more traffic to our web site comes through search engines and recommendations directly into specific content, we strive to build our service along with the credo that ’every page is a front page’. This means wherever you land on our site you should get the full public service spectrum of content and find relevant story’s to follow up on.

At the same time the editorial resources are highly limited, and we want our journalists to make content, not edit subject pages. So all this will have to be as highly automated as possible.

Additionally we are preparing for opening up our API’s for third parties to build services upon, for users to fine tune their own content flows (a first product built on Yle’s API’s is Uutisvahti / The News guard – a personalised news app) and free aggregation over the internet for humans as well as machines.

In this way we hope to keep up our relevance and presence to our audience through high quality public service journalism in todays fragmented media reality.